As tertiary arts departments across the country come alive with students back after the summer break, in some universities at least, it won’t only be visual arts, theatre and music students filling up the buildings.
In a steady trend started a little over a decade ago, some Australian universities have been making concerted efforts to welcome non-arts undergraduates into specially designed creative arts units and, in recent years, those efforts have been paying off in a big way.
While humanities subjects have stagnated or declined in recent years, university arts faculties that have opened their arms to students from other degree areas have actually increased their numbers and equipped these ‘non-arts’ students with a host of valuable professional skills.
Creative practice about more than creativity
As Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne, Professor Marie Sierra manages one of Australia’s largest university creative arts programs offering arts-related electives to undergraduate electives.
As Sierra explains, since 2012 her faculty – which includes the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (MCM) – has welcomed University of Melbourne students enrolled in degrees such as Science, Engineering and Humanities, to join creative arts elective units across her Faculty’s seven subject areas (theatre, dance, music, visual art, film and TV, music theatre, and design and production).
Sierra says enrolments in these electives have been strong since the beginning, and have grown steadily year on year since then.
“We would typically have around 2500 students enrolled in a creative arts major with the faculty, while there are around 11,500 enrolments in the creative arts elective units,” Sierra tells ArtsHub.
“Of those 11,500 elective enrolments, students might be taking anything from an entry level group choir subject [to] a drawing subject, or a dance class.”
Sierra says some of the faculty’s most popular electives are across the performing arts, which she believes draws on students’ histories of engaging with music, acting or dance in their childhood or teenage years.
“Very often they have played an instrument, or they draw or paint, or have done acting or dancing as a child, and they want to reengage with that,” she says.
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But aside from those personal benefits for students, Sierra says this engagement in creative processes sets up some important foundations for their future professional lives.
“It has been shown for some time that people who understand creativity are better performers in a work environment, regardless of what kind of work that it is,” she says.
“They may be accountants or lawyers, but they have a creative ability to think laterally and be open-ended and experimental, and feel comfortable with the idea of risk and the possibility of failure.
“The other important attribute it encourages is the capacity to work collaboratively,” she continues.
“This is particularly true of performing arts practices, which are inherently collaborative. But, even though there are stereotypes around visual artists working alone in the garret, the visual arts units are also important ways for students to learn new ways of working together, and to engage in discussion about ways of being in the world.”
Sierra continues, “We put a lot of emphasis on working with others as part of the learning in these subjects.
“Creating culture is a collective endeavour, and I think these are qualities that we, as a society, are increasingly coming to understand in terms of the importance of the arts, and the broad role the arts plays in contributing to the fabric of who we are and how we behave towards one another.”
Creative practice fosters a different kind of discipline
Another advocate for the benefits of creative arts electives for students outside the artistic disciplines is The University of Western Australia’s (UWA’s) Dean, School of Design, Associate Professor Kate Hislop, whose faculty’s electives program has been thriving for almost as many years The University of Melbourne’s.
UWA’s degree structure parallels Melbourne’s – which both follow a tertiary degree structure commonly known as the Bologna model – which entails students taking a number of electives outside their core discipline in the first years of their degrees.
Hislop says the Design School’s visual arts electives have been immensely popular since they were introduced in 2012 and, like Sierra, she has seen their positive influence on students’ social and professional outlooks.
“I think because these units don’t require any prior experience with creative practice, and they don’t have large exams at the end of the semester, students tend to see them as fun units where they can experiment and explore,” Hislop says.
“But that doesn’t mean they can slack off,” she continues.
“In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Our drawing, painting and digital art electives are very rigorous, because students have to maintain a portfolio of work through the semester, and produce new work every week.”
Looking at the numbers
In terms of numbers, UWA’s Creative Arts enrolments far outnumber students enrolled in its Fine Arts major.
As Hislop explains, “We offer two first year visual arts elective units every semester, and we typically get between 180 and 220 students enrolled in each of those units – so it’s huge.
“That compares with our cohorts enrolled in Fine Arts as a major or part of a double major, the numbers of which vary, but are usually around 25 to 50 students across each of the three years of those degrees.”
Aside from the significant influx of students on campus, Hislop says that from her observations, the Fine Arts electives offer students unique social benefits that are achieved in large part through the act of gathering together in close proximity, away from screens and social media.
“They are literally sitting or standing there together, usually grouped around their easels, which in itself is a powerful way of communicating and connecting,” she says.
“Having said that, our digital art and animation electives are incredibly popular too,” she laughs. “So that is a different kind of creative process.
“But in either case, students enter their studios and can close things out for a while, engaging in the act of making artwork that can create a pause in their daily lives.
“The effects of that can be really profound in terms of how they learn to think through challenges they face, and how they position themselves in relation to those challenges, and try to create something [in response],” she adds.
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On that note, Hislop also sees creative arts practices as giving young people a greater sense of ownership over their choices in an increasingly erratic and changeable world.
“There is almost nothing certain for young people embarking on the early stages of their future career now,” she says.
“And if you take on board the environmental challenges we are facing, and AI that is coming at us thick and fast, I think what the creative pursuits can do is to give people some control over how they respond to those things, and that is going to be very important to the next generations of problem-solvers in our society in so many areas – both art and design, but more broadly too.”
